Something's - once again - brewing within the GNOME project. While a mere suggestion for now, and by no means any form of official policy, influential voices within the GNOME project are arguing that GNOME should become a full-fledged Linux-based operating system, and that the desktop environment should drop support for other operating systems such as Solaris and the BSDs. I have a feeling this isn't going to go down well with many of our readers.

You clearly have no idea what systemd is all about. It's not just a neat replacement for init like upstart but a serious attempt to massively parallelize daemon startup, introduce a nanny for the daemons, reduce the clutter from all the bash scripts in /etc/init.d and much more.

Fortunately MacOS X is a BSD camp and wont follow suit but I wish you luck pushing such brilliant ideas into Windows then.

systemd is heavily inspired by Apple's launchd which has replaced everything from rc.d to cron.d in MacOS since 10.4.

Which was ported to FreeBSD and lives happily in the ports tree, should anyone really need it.

"systemd is heavily inspired by Apple's launchd which has replaced everything from rc.d to cron.d in MacOS since 10.4.

Which was ported to FreeBSD and lives happily in the ports tree, should anyone really need it. "

Nice, I didn't know that!

So, there should be a chance to write some "glue code" which would make GNOME use launchd on *BSD instead of systemd, shouldn't there?

Didn't someone already mention in this thread that Poettering himself said that he would rather see people write a BSD-specific version of systemd instead of putting too much bloat into the systemd sources by porting it to non-Linux platforms?

With that in mind, I think the situation with GNOME depending on systemd is probably far less problematic than many would think =).

Actually, I like FreeBSD for adopting a lot of nice things from the enterprise world like zfs and launchd. BSD is obviously better off in this regard when they don't have to reinvent the wheel (btrfs, systemd) but can simply use software which is already around.